Business Insider

The article goes on to discuss a number of other developments that set up the company to succeed in the years ahead, including the hiring of a new retail czar from Burberry and several key corporate acquisitions that will help with mapping, search, and Apple TV.

Yarow is also predicting that the company will launch a few new products this year, including a larger iPhone, an improved iPad, and a new operating system for Mac computers.

Much of this widely reported news is no doubt baked into Apple's stock price. Thus, the main value of this piece is to remind us that there is real life to Apple since the death of Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately, gold investors likely have less to feel good about than Apple.

A piece by CNBC.com writer Ansuya Harjani makes the case that 2014 will be another down year for the precious metal. And a review of the evidence makes it hard to see the bear case for gold is wrong.

CNBC.com

And with the Fed dedicated to curtailing easy money and even raising short-term rates for years to come, combined with a "benign global inflation outlook," it's hard to imagine, short of a surprise geopolitical crisis, how gold can rally.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, predicts bullion is set to fall at least 15% this year.

And the picture for gold-mining stocks is likely to be even bleaker since those companies tend to be a leveraged bet on the price of the metal.

But at least no one is predicting the demise of gold as an alternative to dollar and the stock and bond markets.

The same cannot be said for bitcoin.

Writing for Bloomberg, Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia, writes that the much-discussed digital currency is a "high-tech dinosaur soon to be extinct."

Mihm argues that bitcoin, rather than being a financial instrument of the future, "is a throwback to an earlier era, when private currencies circulated alongside government-sponsored money.

"This isn't a comforting historical parallel," Mihm adds. "The alternative currencies of the past are long gone, thanks to a decades-long campaign by governments aimed at monopolizing the money supply. The lesson of their rise and fall is one that bitcoin's boosters would be foolish not to heed."

While hedge funds, on average, took it on the chin in a year when it was far better to mindlessly hold a market-based ETF, a few big smart-money guys made out well by betting heavily on trades that worked out.

Among this year's winners were John Paulson, who famously made billions of dollars by shorting the housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis.

This time around, Paulson's hedge-fund operation has benefited from its long positions on a variety of stocks.